So you’ve been on the internet for some time now and even though you’re not the most technically inclined person, you’ve heard it’s easy to create your own website and so now you want one.

Great. Where do you begin?

Why, with this hub you see here, of course! Let’s get started.

The First Order of Business (or not) for Your Website

First thing you need to decide is if you want a website for personal stuff or if you want to make money from it.

If it’s personal, then you’ll have more creative freedom because, basically, the only person you have to please is yourself.

If you want to make money from your website, then you have to first determine who your target audience (who the people visiting your website are) is and how you plan to make the money (either by selling goods and services yourself or through an affiliate program, or by selling advertising on your website).

Okay, you want your own website but you don’t have a lot of money (hey, times are tough!).

No problem.

First, check with your own Internet Service Provider, or ISP. Many ISPs offer their customers free websites.

There are a number of other websites that will let you publish your own website for free. If you prefer a traditional, static website with several pages that won’t change much over time, here are links to a few good places:

Webs

Weebly (although Weebly will let you run both a static website and a blog)

If blogging regularly is more your thing, and you plan to post to your blog regularly, you might want to look at these sites:

Blogger

Wordpress

If you want a website with a focus on photos, Check out Shutterfly.

Most of the free websites let you design and layout your website the way you want it, or you can choose from several pre-made website templates.  No need to know HTML or programming, either, as most of these websites use drag-and-drop features to make creating your website as easy as pie. 

You didn’t think there wouldn’t be any disadvantages to free websites, did you?

Many free websites will put advertising on your website, whether you like it or not. They have to pay the bills somehow.

Additionally, many free websites won’t let you make money, whether it be by selling products or by offering advertising on your website. Two notable exceptions are Blogger.com, which is owned by Google and will let you place Google ads (for which you can receive money) on your blog; and Weebly (see above) which will not only not put unwanted ads on your site, but will allow you to put Google ads on your site so you can make some moolah.

Last but not least: you can’t have your own domain. If you thought you’ve dreamed up the coolest domain name ever (eg., mydomain.com) and you want to use it, forget it. The free websites will give you a domain name that looks something like this:

mydomain.freewebsite.com

or this:

freewebsite.com/mydomain

Sorry, that’s just how it is. As a result, getting a free website works best if you want a personal website but it is not recommended if you want to make money from your website (with the exceptions noted above).

You’ve decided you wanted to have a website with your own domain name. Cool. But it will cost you.

Domain names by themselves aren’t terribly expensive. A typical .com domain name should run you about $10 or so, depending on the registrar (this is the name for companies that sell domain names), although some registrars charge more.

You might also want to consider paying extra for private registration when you register your domain name, especially if you’re running your website out of your home. When you register a domain name, you must provide a good address, phone number and other contact information. This information becomes publicly accessible almost right away.

With private registration the registrar lists itself as the contact for your domain name. If indeed you are contacted by anyone in relation to your website and domain name, it will come through your registrar, rather than directly to you, if you sign up for this service. Most registrars offer private registration for about $10 or so.

This is where “webhosting,” or hosting, comes in.

Practically all websites are a collection of files sitting on a big computer—a server—somewhere. Just like the word processing and spreadsheet documents on your computer. The difference is the Internet is a network of many, many computers.

When a web surfer visits a web page, what actually happens is her computer pulls up the files for that web page from another computer (the server). The files are rendered as a web page on her computer.

In order to get your website going, the files for it (the page or pages themselves, any photos, graphics or videos you may have for your website, etc.) must be hosted on a server somewhere.

There are a number of companies that offer webhosting of your own domain name, some reasonable, some not so much. A few of the more reasonable ones are:

BlueHost

Just Host

Host Gator

Go Daddy

Two things to look for when looking for a hosting company is how much space on their servers they will give you for posting the files that make up your website; and how much bandwidth they give you.

Bandwidth involves the amount of visitors and the size of files you have on your website. If you have a lot of graphics, photos, videos, etc. that come up every time a visitor visits, you will eat up a lot of bandwidth with only a few visitors, never mind a whole slew of them. Conversely, if your web site is mostly text with few other items, you'll save bandwidth--but your site might be a bit too boring to many visitors.

Fortunately, there are so many web hosting companies out there and competition among them is so fierce that many hosting companies will offer you unlimited server space and unlimited bandwidth. In addition, some hosting companies will let you host multiple domain names on one hosting account (although you do have to pay to register each domain name), which is something to think about. A few web hosting companies will even kick in the first domain name for free, with purchase of a year's worth of hosting.  And most of the hosting companies, like the free websites listed above, have things set up so you can create your web pages easily, without your needing to become a 'techie" to do so.

Something else to consider is how user friendly a web hosting company's interface is. To be perfectly blunt, Go Daddy is a pretty good company but their user interface can be confusing and they are very aggressive about wanting to sell you additional services and products, which can be annoying. Bluehost is a little easier to use but they offer little support so you're on your own to a certain degree.

Bottom line: Figure out why you want a website, and what you want to do with it. Figure out if free hosting will work for what you want, or if getting your own domain name and hosting for it is what you need. Then check out several web hosting companies before you sign on the dotted line, so to speak.

And now is the part of this hub where I drop the bonus bomb on you: Of all the web hosting companies listed above, there are two that will let you host your own domain name for free (with the understanding that you do have to pay for registering the domain name, of course). One is Weebly, which, as noted before, will let you run either a static website or both a static website and a blog. The other is Blogger, which will host your domain name for only the price of registering a domain name but will only let you have a blog.